I’ve created a rebuttal to komponisto’s misleading Amanda Knox post, but don’t have enough karma to create my own top-level post. For now, I’ve just put it here:
If you actually want to debate this, we could do so in the comments section of my post, or alternatively over in the Richard Dawkins forum.
(Though since you say “my intent is merely to debunk komponisto’s post rather than establish Amanda’s guilt”, I’m suspicious. See Against Devil’s Advocacy.)
Make sure you’ve read my comments here in addition to my post itself.
There is one thing I agree with you about, and that is that this statement of mine
these two things constituting so far as I know the entirety of the physical “evidence” against the couple
is misleading. The misleading part is the phrase “so far as I know”, which has been interpreted by people who evidently did not read my preceding survey post to mean that I had not heard about all the other alleged physical evidence. I didn’t consider this interpretation because I was assuming that my readers had read both True Justice and Friends of Amanda, knew from my previous post that I had obviously read them both myself, and would understand my statement for what it was -- a dismissal of the rest of the so-called “evidence”. However, in retrospect, I should have foreseen this misunderstanding, so I’ve now edited the sentence to read:
these two things constituting pretty much the entirety of the physical “evidence” against the couple.
ETA: At least one person has upvoted the parent without also upvoting this comment, which I interpret as an endorsement of Rolf Nelson’s essay. I find this baffling. Almost every one Nelson’s points (autopsy report, luminol prints, staged break-in, alleged cleanup...) was extensively discussed in comments at the time. The only one that wasn’t (a supposed handprint of Knox’s on a pillow in Kercher’s room) is an outright falsehood—as you will see from following Nelson’s link, it’s not even (close to) what that article claims. Furthermore, Nelson criticizes me for “accept[ing] propaganda from the Friends of Amanda (FoA) at face value” while citing True Justice for an “Introduction to Logic 101″.
I challenge anyone who thinks that this represents a serious challenge to my post to come out and identify themselves.
It is pretty clear to me that Devil’s Advocacy is valuable for precisely the reasons in the link Eliezer added at the end of the post (Brandon). I’m not sure we should, therefore, be automatically linking to the piece in response to instances of Devil’s advocacy until and unless someone writes a complementary post rebutting Brandon’s.
It is pretty clear to me that Devil’s Advocacy is valuable for precisely the reasons in the link Eliezer added at the end of the post (Brandon). I’m not sure we should, therefore, be automatically linking to the piece in response to instances of Devil’s advocacy until and unless someone writes a complementary post rebutting Brandon’s.
The only reason I haven’t posted my draft “Against Devil’s Advocacy” is that someone beat me to the punch and I didn’t want to make a redundant post. I endorce links to ‘Against Devil’s Advocacy’ precisely because it is an important subset of ‘Advocacy’ with all the related problems.
(a supposed handprint of Knox’s on a pillow in Kercher’s room) is an outright falsehood—as you will see from following Nelson’s link, it’s not even (close to) what that article claims.
Did you misread the source?
I said:
“One of Amanda’s bloody footprints was found inside the murder room, on a pillow hidden under Meredith’s body.”
“Guede’s bloody shoeprint was also positively identified on a pillow found under the victim’s body… Police also found the trace of a smaller shoe print on the pillow compatible with shoe sizes 6–8. The print did not, however, match any of the shoes belonging to Knox or Kercher that were found in the house. Knox wears a size 7, Rinaldi said.”
I’ve created a rebuttal to komponisto’s misleading Amanda Knox post, but don’t have enough karma to create my own top-level post. For now, I’ve just put it here:
I don’t understand how this was worked around. It looks like (rolf’s karma + karma lost by this being posted at the top level) would still have been insufficient.
The karma limit was serving the purpose for which it was intended. If, for some reason, an exception was granted I would like to see this announced.
money is the unit of caring; karma is just a number
Seriously, I’ve had some interesting discussions with Rolf in the past elsewhere. I’m not sure why he doesn’t participate much here, and why he chose this topic to put his efforts into. But maybe we can cut him some slack?
Rolf isn’t the one we’d be cutting slack to here. It is the moderator’s decision to circumvent the karma system to post a political rant that warrants scrutiny.
Eliezer has been quite adamant that this is not the blog of the SIAI. In that context and elsewhere the moderation process has been held to high standards of consistency and transparency. At least acknowledging that special allowances were made (and who made them) would be nice.
I expect the moderator has already learned their lesson. Posting Rolf’s rant seems to have allowed him to embarrass himself and can only be expected to have the opposite effect to the one intended. The ~50 karma limit gives people a chance to read posts like this and better calibrate his posting to the social environment before he puts his foot in his mouth.
PS: Can anyone remember what the post was called in which Eliezer describes a scenario about deducing the bias of a coin? A motivated speaker gives only a subset of a stream of coin tosses… I couldn’t remember the title.
I had thought he was here solely to discuss this one thing. If he’s interested in the things we’re interested in in general as evinced powerfully by those donations then yes, I’ll increase the slack I cut. Thanks.
BTW I think it’s pretty unlikely that anyone at SIAI has used admin privs to allow Rolf to make a top-level post he wouldn’t otherwise have been able to make.
Criticizing komponisto for citing “Friends of Amanda Knox” while you yourself cite “True Justice” causes those criticisms to fall flat.
Unfortunately, I find that your essay is wading into Dark Arts territory, since its intent is to show that komponisto’s original essay was “misleading”, and that that would somehow give veracity to arguments of Amanda Knox’s guilt. Using that same logic, one would have to consider the implications of the chief prosecutor in Amanda Knox’s case being convicted of abuse of office in another murder trial.
However, I would be interested in seeing komponisto and rolf nelson discuss the actual details of the case; in particular, the points that rolf nelson brought up in the essay.
Re: dark arts territory, I agree completely. This criticism should be directed more strongly to komponisto. My intent here is merely to repair some of the Bayesian damage caused by komponisto’s original post. Perhaps this will dissuade people from wandering into dark arts territory in the future, or at least to wander in with misleading claims.
I said once in the doc that ‘truejustice claims that X’. Because I said ‘truejustice claims that X’ rather than just stating X as though it were uncontested fact, and because X is basically correct, I claim that my doc is not misleading. If X is untrue, that would be a different story. In other words, if komponisto cited FoA and FoA’s claims were true, I would not accuse him of being misleading.
I’ve created a rebuttal to komponisto’s misleading Amanda Knox post, but don’t have enough karma to create my own top-level post. For now, I’ve just put it here:
http://docs.google.com/View?id=dgb3jmh2_5hj95vzgk
If you actually want to debate this, we could do so in the comments section of my post, or alternatively over in the Richard Dawkins forum.
(Though since you say “my intent is merely to debunk komponisto’s post rather than establish Amanda’s guilt”, I’m suspicious. See Against Devil’s Advocacy.)
Make sure you’ve read my comments here in addition to my post itself.
There is one thing I agree with you about, and that is that this statement of mine
is misleading. The misleading part is the phrase “so far as I know”, which has been interpreted by people who evidently did not read my preceding survey post to mean that I had not heard about all the other alleged physical evidence. I didn’t consider this interpretation because I was assuming that my readers had read both True Justice and Friends of Amanda, knew from my previous post that I had obviously read them both myself, and would understand my statement for what it was -- a dismissal of the rest of the so-called “evidence”. However, in retrospect, I should have foreseen this misunderstanding, so I’ve now edited the sentence to read:
ETA: At least one person has upvoted the parent without also upvoting this comment, which I interpret as an endorsement of Rolf Nelson’s essay. I find this baffling. Almost every one Nelson’s points (autopsy report, luminol prints, staged break-in, alleged cleanup...) was extensively discussed in comments at the time. The only one that wasn’t (a supposed handprint of Knox’s on a pillow in Kercher’s room) is an outright falsehood—as you will see from following Nelson’s link, it’s not even (close to) what that article claims. Furthermore, Nelson criticizes me for “accept[ing] propaganda from the Friends of Amanda (FoA) at face value” while citing True Justice for an “Introduction to Logic 101″.
I challenge anyone who thinks that this represents a serious challenge to my post to come out and identify themselves.
It is pretty clear to me that Devil’s Advocacy is valuable for precisely the reasons in the link Eliezer added at the end of the post (Brandon). I’m not sure we should, therefore, be automatically linking to the piece in response to instances of Devil’s advocacy until and unless someone writes a complementary post rebutting Brandon’s.
The only reason I haven’t posted my draft “Against Devil’s Advocacy” is that someone beat me to the punch and I didn’t want to make a redundant post. I endorce links to ‘Against Devil’s Advocacy’ precisely because it is an important subset of ‘Advocacy’ with all the related problems.
Did you misread the source?
I said:
“One of Amanda’s bloody footprints was found inside the murder room, on a pillow hidden under Meredith’s body.”
The source I cited (http://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/International/story?id=7538538&page=2) said:
“Guede’s bloody shoeprint was also positively identified on a pillow found under the victim’s body… Police also found the trace of a smaller shoe print on the pillow compatible with shoe sizes 6–8. The print did not, however, match any of the shoes belonging to Knox or Kercher that were found in the house. Knox wears a size 7, Rinaldi said.”
Anyway, a debate sounds like a fun use of free time; I replied to the comment you indicated: http://lesswrong.com/lw/1j7/the_amanda_knox_test_how_an_hour_on_the_internet/1gdo
I don’t understand how this was worked around. It looks like (rolf’s karma + karma lost by this being posted at the top level) would still have been insufficient.
The karma limit was serving the purpose for which it was intended. If, for some reason, an exception was granted I would like to see this announced.
Rolf is a major SIAI donor/supporter, so draw your own conclusion there.
Here’s a bunch of mine, for fun:
money > karma
control the physical layer
beware the other kind of status
money is the unit of caring; karma is just a number
Seriously, I’ve had some interesting discussions with Rolf in the past elsewhere. I’m not sure why he doesn’t participate much here, and why he chose this topic to put his efforts into. But maybe we can cut him some slack?
Rolf isn’t the one we’d be cutting slack to here. It is the moderator’s decision to circumvent the karma system to post a political rant that warrants scrutiny.
Eliezer has been quite adamant that this is not the blog of the SIAI. In that context and elsewhere the moderation process has been held to high standards of consistency and transparency. At least acknowledging that special allowances were made (and who made them) would be nice.
I expect the moderator has already learned their lesson. Posting Rolf’s rant seems to have allowed him to embarrass himself and can only be expected to have the opposite effect to the one intended. The ~50 karma limit gives people a chance to read posts like this and better calibrate his posting to the social environment before he puts his foot in his mouth.
PS: Can anyone remember what the post was called in which Eliezer describes a scenario about deducing the bias of a coin? A motivated speaker gives only a subset of a stream of coin tosses… I couldn’t remember the title.
What evidence filtered evidence?
I had thought he was here solely to discuss this one thing. If he’s interested in the things we’re interested in in general as evinced powerfully by those donations then yes, I’ll increase the slack I cut. Thanks.
BTW I think it’s pretty unlikely that anyone at SIAI has used admin privs to allow Rolf to make a top-level post he wouldn’t otherwise have been able to make.
Criticizing komponisto for citing “Friends of Amanda Knox” while you yourself cite “True Justice” causes those criticisms to fall flat.
Unfortunately, I find that your essay is wading into Dark Arts territory, since its intent is to show that komponisto’s original essay was “misleading”, and that that would somehow give veracity to arguments of Amanda Knox’s guilt. Using that same logic, one would have to consider the implications of the chief prosecutor in Amanda Knox’s case being convicted of abuse of office in another murder trial.
However, I would be interested in seeing komponisto and rolf nelson discuss the actual details of the case; in particular, the points that rolf nelson brought up in the essay.
Re: dark arts territory, I agree completely. This criticism should be directed more strongly to komponisto. My intent here is merely to repair some of the Bayesian damage caused by komponisto’s original post. Perhaps this will dissuade people from wandering into dark arts territory in the future, or at least to wander in with misleading claims.
I hardly think komponisto inflicted “Bayesian damage” on the members of Less Wrong, seeing as they had already overwhelmingly come to the conclusion that Amanda Knox was not guilty before he had even presented his own arguments.
I said once in the doc that ‘truejustice claims that X’. Because I said ‘truejustice claims that X’ rather than just stating X as though it were uncontested fact, and because X is basically correct, I claim that my doc is not misleading. If X is untrue, that would be a different story. In other words, if komponisto cited FoA and FoA’s claims were true, I would not accuse him of being misleading.